Who did you meet?

5 min readApr 25, 2022

Outreach During The Pandemic

by Maagic Collins

One of the first outreach efforts in the middle of the pandemic was around May 7, 2021. This outreach was in Culver City. Me and another Painted Brain employee showed up with face shields, masks, gloves, and armed with these little, square Painted Brain fliers of support information. We looked like a rehearsal of a moon landing production, our first discovery was where to get coffee. We then went to stores and had conversations at some homeless encampments. One of my conversations was by a freeway overpass, with a young man who was standing in front of me, yet barely conscious as he stammered and mumbled. To the side of us, a street team power-washed the debris along the encampment. This kicked off our early days of outreach with the CalHope/Fema grant funding our efforts.

Personal Photo: Dec 20, 2021, Christmas Toy Drive: L.A. Global/Ms. Hazel House

This project is unique as it empowers community members to provide emergency mental health support after a natural disaster. They would be able to offer peer support for their neighbors, helping them through the day-to-day with their mental health in the most adverse circumstances. In this case, the natural disaster was a pandemic that was entering its second year with the added tension of unresolved racial disparities and social injustice coming to a head once again in our country. While we dealt with the virus the second major pandemic was simultaneously the mental health crisis that started way before the pandemic. Exacerbated by the toxic nature of political spin during an election year. In the months that followed, we ended up working all over LA County and surrounding areas, such as South Central, Pasadena, Long Beach, Compton, Plaza Del Valle in Panorama City, and as far as Cedar Ave Arts District in Lancaster.

During this period so many memorable encounters resonate with me, yet I’ll only mention a few in this piece. One man, I’ll call him D, was in his mid-thirties. He kept singing oldies from artists like Stevie Wonder, Temptations, and The Commodores. D had a good voice. He’d tell me all the things he used to do. The church he used to attend had the best singers and he was proud to be one of them. One of the most important parts of his story was when the church he grew up in was sold, he still remembers it. D said everything changed once the church sold and moved to a new location. This moment stuck with me as I felt it revealed what a pivotal moment this was in his life, and not to assume, I asked him if he felt the same way and after some thought, he agreed and went into more details about the church. The social network that formed him and helped develop his identity was no more. He would eventually fall out of the church altogether. We went on to talk about his shots at getting on a rap label and his days running track and how fast he was. Yet all I could think about was, how his life would have turned out had that church not been sold, for better or for worse.

His situation and so many others shine a light on the damages done by gentrification. Not to say the church being sold was a moment of gentrification but it is a greater understanding of why black and indigenous communities fight so hard against displacement. The damages of gentrification are like a wrecking ball to communities and the effects ripple throughout the years.

The next person, I’ll call her Ms. Lady. Ms. Lady was in her sixties, with teeth missing and she spoke like she was still banging in the streets. Every now and then, while she talked, she’d get right up in your face. Talking about the street life, who she had to check. Moving her stuff out of storage places because of who she was fighting. The profanity she spoke with was musical and unrelenting as we talked right on the corner of Martin Luther King Jr Blvd. and Crenshaw. It was something about her, a survivor of the 80’s crack epidemic and “War on Drugs.” She is still here talking her sh*t. Ms. Lady is an example of the black communities’ continued need for the best mental health and homeless rehabilitation centers as the war on black folks has taken its toll. We need a people’s budget rather than the same type of ineffective budget our public officials continue to pass off as progressive and bold.

As the CalHope/Fema project comes to a close, the challenges remain. We now are reminded of the many disparities that exist in underserved neighborhoods. The ever-present habitual government neglect of these communities took decades to get here and, in some cases such as redlining, the racist practices are in the bedrock of our institutions. One can only hope we learn to fully invest in our social care systems, embracing the voices of the community as the Peoples’ Budget a budget composed of input from thousands of community members. We must not revert to the dark ages of underfunding the services communities need most while continuing to suppress those needs with over-policing and criminalization. We can be better and we can do better as a society.